Disquiet Junto Project 0210: Ice Coda


The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20150101-icemusic2015

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on [SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and at [disquiet.com/junto](https://disquiet.com/junto/), a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Tracks added to this playlist for the duration of this project:

This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 7, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 11, 2016.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at [tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto)):

Disquiet Junto Project 0210: Ice Coda

ӬThe Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

Happy new year! This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012.

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Step 2: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 3: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it”— as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each year since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. At the start of the fifth (!) year of the Disquiet Junto, it is a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Deadline: This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 7, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 11, 2016.

Length: Length is up to you, though between one and four minutes is recommended.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, and be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0210-icecoda.”Also use “disquiet0210-icecoda”as a tag for your track.

Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 210th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it”) at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0210: Ice Coda

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

https://disquiet.com/forums/

Photo associated with this project by Michael Scott used via Creative Commons license:

Temporary Blocks

The Ever Portable Ukulele Meets Mobile Digital Audio Processing

In three experiments by Ashley Elsdon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are many types of music apps — that is, apps employed in the making of music. In terms of the intent packed into those apps, through both features and branding, they can been seen, very broadly, to fall into two categories: first, apps that miniaturize for our phone/tablet age tools that existed in the past; second, apps that go new places.

As a longtime follower of digital music-making tools intended for use on the go, PalmSounds.net blogger Ashley Elsdon falls firmly in the latter camp — a subject explored in depth in an interview I did with him late last year ([“Immediacy + Accessibility = Joy”](https://disquiet.com/2015/11/08/palmsounds-ashley-elsdon/)). When I did the interview, I was very familiar with Elsdon’s fixation on mobile music making, from its early-ish fledgling flourishing on the defunct Palm platform, on through the golden age of iOS apps.

What I wasn’t familiar with was Elsdon’s own music. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, to hear these recent experiments of his for digitally processed ukulele. All three employ different apps (as detailed in a short post at [palmsounds.net](http://www.palmsounds.net/2016/01/explorations-with-ukulele-and-iks-irig.html)) to both halo and process the ukulele’s unique, casual, often gestural tonalities. They’re quite distinct recordings from each other, but they also hold together as a set. “Ukulele Exploration 1” in particular rewards repeat listening, with its dubby echoes of gentle plucking and strums.

Tracks originally posted at [soundcloud.com/palmsounds](https://soundcloud.com/palmsounds).

Feeling the Hand on the Pad in Instrumental Hip-hop

Two tracks from the forthcoming album Subtle Busyness from Philadelphia-based Arcka

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20160105-arcka

Arcka, aka Shawn Kelly, the artist also known as Arkatron, and formerly as Y?Arcka, has a release, *Subtle Busyness*, due out shortly on the Twin Springs Tapes label. Two tracks have been posted to the label’s SoundCloud account in advance. Both are instrumental hip-hop, which is where Arcka lives, but they go in distinctly different directions.

“Lunar”is a blissfully steady two-minute beat with dreamy undertones. Nudges in the bass and swirly synthesized, zithery accents entertain psychedelic associations. Put it on repeat.

“Aerofloat”is more characteristic of Arcka, which is to say it’s more difficult to pigeonhole and a rewarding listen for that very reason. Early on the beat slows to a syrupy pause, like a hip-hop train losing steam as it comes into the station, and for an extended period you listen inside the audio, to warped elements and a richly irregular rhythm. Of course, then it nearly flies out of control — though not fully, because Arcka is at the wheel.

Hip-hop production has a reputation for being studio music, and that’s certainly the case with Arcka, who does much of his work on an MPC, the classic rap-music workhorse. However, it’s useful to remember what a tactile machine the MPC is, how beloved its pads are to producers. In “Aerofloat”there are, throughout, these pixie-stick triggers that are just enough off the beat that you can sense the hand of producer. The music of Arcka may be recorded and constructed, cut-up and arranged, but the life blood is self-evident throughout.

Here’s a shot from a few years ago of Arcka cleaning the insides of his well-used MPC:

A photo posted by ARCKATRON (@arckatron) on

The two-track set was first posted at [soundcloud.com/twin-springs-tapes](https://soundcloud.com/twin-springs-tapes/sets/arckatron-subtle-busyness). More from Arcka at [arckatron.us](http://arckatron.us/). More from the Twin Springs label at [twinspringstapes.bandcamp.com](https://twinspringstapes.bandcamp.com/) and [facebook.com/twinspringstapes](https://www.facebook.com/twinspringstapes). The album is due out, in a limited edition of 100 tapes, shortly. And here’s an interview I did with Arcka/Kelly, who is based in Philadelhia, back in 2009: [“Young Communicator.”](https://disquiet.com/2009/05/17/yarcka-young-architect-shawn-kelly/)

When the Violin Provides the Saw Wave

A live noise performance by Liz Meredith of Baltimore, Maryland

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

liz_meredith_0049e-or_cropped

Liz Meredith’s violin is so deeply buried in the glorious noise of this live recording, from July of last year, that the instrument is barely if ever recognizable. What is recognizable is an urge to take static and interference and loop them until they push at and against the ear’s penchant for pattern. There’s a sawing early on that could be the violin, or it could just as likely be a saw wave. For just over 10 minutes, she rages in slow motion, at one moment suggesting a fourth-world raga, at another a sonar beacon. The performance was taped at the Windup Space in Baltimore, Maryland, where Meredith lives.

On the gentler, if still at times nervous-making, end of the continuum, also recommended is this 2013 collaboration between Meredith and John Somers, *The Disposition of Vibrant Forms*, a collection of wonderful longform drones, ranging in length from nearly 12 to over 20 minutes:

Live track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/liz-meredith](https://soundcloud.com/liz-meredith/live-solo-performance-at-windup-space-71015). *Disposition* album at [thedispositionofvibrantforms.bandcamp](https://thedispositionofvibrantforms.bandcamp.com/). More from Meredith at [lizmeredith.com](http://lizmeredith.com/), where the above photo originated.

Music That Can Be Thought of as Perfect

A series of digitally mediated guitar improvisations by Brussels-based Valid Lover

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is a kind of music that can be thought of as perfect. That’s not a qualitative statement of taste so much as an attribution that recognizes how fierce dedication to an elegant scope can yield something singular, effecting, evocative. The term applies, certainly, to a series of live improvisations for digitally mediated electric guitar recently posted by Valid Lover, who’s based in Brussels, Belgium. The music is deeply spare, consisting of brief, tentative moments, not so much riffs as instances when fingers hit strings, moments smaller still, within a cycle of a vibration. Those riffs trigger digital refractions, echoes, and splinters, high-pitched sounds that linger in the air like sulfur, quavering pulses that your ear keeps listening for long after they’ve passed.

The track “Sketch 16″ — they’re all “sketches” in the titling — is a great entry point to what serves as two full albums of examples, *(Air ( and the divisions between )* and *Weight ( with those held beneath )*, both available from his [validlover.bandcamp.com](https://validlover.bandcamp.com/) page for free streaming or a small download expense (€5). At times the derivations from guitar are so precise that they bring to mind the artificial strings employed by Oval (Markus Popp) on his 2010 album, *O*, but the majority have a casual quality that draws on the unique characteristics of live performance.

Track originally posted at [validlover.bandcamp.com](https://validlover.bandcamp.com/track/sketch-16) as part of the album [*Air ( and the divisions between )*](https://validlover.bandcamp.com/album/air-and-the-divisions-between). Found via a discussion at the [llllllll.co](http://llllllll.co/t/latest-tracks-videos/99/251) message boards.